Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

In the morning she awoke with a start and a chill, and sprang out of bed, governed by an impulse to fling herself against the bars. But sleep had refreshed her, and she sat down and reasoned herself into courage and hope once more. The tussle with the world develops the iron in a woman’s blood, and Patience’s experiences of the last year and a half stood her in good stead now. When the girl came in to arrange her room and Tarbox brought her breakfast, the commonplace details completed her poise. The morning mail brought her letters from Steele and Hal.

Dear Girl [Steele’s ran],—You are blue and frightened and lonesome. I wish I were there to cheer you up. But the first day will be the worst. Remember that liberty is not far off. They cannot convict you. I shall see you a few hours after you get this.

M. S.

The box arrived an hour later. It contained her silver toilet-set, and all the paraphernalia of a well-groomed and pretty woman, a bottle of cologne, a box of candy, eight French novels, a large box of handsome writing paper, and a bolt of black satin ribbon. Patience arranged the toilet-set on the bureau, halved the candy with the women, then sat down with a volume of Bourget. When Tarbox came up an hour later with a card she was still reading, and quite herself.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad, I am, to see you so contented and so cool,” he added, mopping his brow. “This gent is below. He says he’s one of the lawyers in the case. I hoped you’d have Bourke. He’s the smartest man in Westchester County! Shall I tell him to come up, or would you like to see him down in the sheriffs office? Anything to please you.”

“Oh, here, by all means, if he doesn’t mind the stairs.”

Tarbox gazed at her admiringly. “Well, ma’am,” he ejaculated, “you are cool, but I for one believe it’s the coolness of innocence. You never did murder!” and he walked hastily away as if ashamed of his enthusiasm.

The lawyer’s card bore the name of Eugene A. Simms. He came up at once, a short thick-set man of thirty, with a square shrewd dogged face, a low brow, a snub nose, and black brilliant hard eyes. He came in with a bustling aggressive business-like air, scanning Patience as if he expected to find all the points of the case written upon her. Patience conceived an immediate and violent dislike to him.

“Will you sit down?” she said stiffly. “You are Mr. Burr’s lawyer, I believe.”

“Oh, no. That’s Bourke. He has charge of the case. I’m getting it up. I shall attend the coroner’s inquest and get the case in shape for Mr. Bourke to conduct.”

The blood rose to Patience’s hair and receded to her heart, which changed its time; but she asked no questions.

Simms leaned forward and fixed her with his unpleasant eyes. “Be perfectly frank with me,” he said, abruptly. “It’s best. We can’t work in the dark. We’ll pull you through; that’s what we are here for.”

“You take it for granted that I am guilty, I suppose?”

“I’m bound to say that all the revealed facts point that way. But of course that makes no difference to us. In fact, the harder a case is the better Bourke likes it—”

“Does Mr. Bourke believe that I am guilty?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him. He merely called me in, put the facts in my hands, and told me to go to work. I haven’t seen him since.”

“I will be perfectly frank with you,” said Patience, who had recovered herself. “I did not murder Mr. Peele. I am not wholly an idiot. If I had wished to poison him do you suppose I would have selected the drug I was known to administer?”

“You might have done it in a moment of passion. You had had a quarrel with him that night.”

“So much the more reason why I would not make such a fatal mistake. It is quite true that when in a passion I frequently expressed the wish to kill him. I will also tell you that one night when dropping the morphine I was seized with an uncontrollable impulse to give him a double dose. I dropped twenty-six drops. But fortunately it takes some time to do that, and meanwhile the impulse weakened, and I anathematised myself as a fool. No man nor woman of respectable brains ever made a mistake like that.”

“What is your own theory?”

“I hardly believe that he committed suicide. I think that he was wild with pain, and did not count the drops. He was probably half blind. On the other hand, he was capable of anything when in a rage.”

Mr. Simms scraped the floor with his boot-heels and beat a tattoo on his knee with his fingers. “Very well,” he said at last. “We take your word, of course. Now tell me as nearly as you can, every circumstance of that night, and give me a general idea of your relations with him and your reasons for leaving him. It is going to be one of the biggest fights this State has ever seen, and we want all the help you can give us.”

After he had gone Patience fell into a rage. Why had not Bourke come himself instead of sending his underling? If he hesitated to meet her after the abominable words he had used that second night at Peele Manor why had he undertaken her case at all? Her pride revolted at the thought of being defended by him, of owing her life to him. Once she was at the point of writing him a haughty note declining to accept his services; but Latimer Burr’s kindness deserved a more gracious acknowledgment. Again, she took up her pen to inform him that unless he apologised he must understand that she could have no relations with him; but her lively fear of making herself ridiculous came to the rescue, and she threw the pen aside. She resumed her novel, but it had lost its flavour. Bourke’s face was on every page. The interview in the elm walk wrote itself between the French lines; and the subsequent conversation in the library danced in letters of red. She hated Bourke the more bitterly because he had once been something more to her than any other man had been. She worked herself into such a bad humour that she almost snubbed Miss Merrien and a “Day” artist who came to interview and sketch her; and when Morgan Steele arrived, late in the afternoon, she was as perverse and unreasonable as if the widowed chÂtelaine of Peele Manor with the world at her feet. He understood her mood perfectly, although not the cause of it, and guyed her into good humour and her native sense of the ridiculous.

“Oh, I do like you,” she said. “You understand me so. Any other man would go off in a huff. And I won’t always be like this. I suppose I am nervous and upset and all the rest of it. Who wouldn’t be? And you know I am tremendously fond of you.”

“I know you are,” he said dryly. “As you will have ample time for reflection and meditation in the next few months, you will find out just how fond. But I am more glad than I can say to find you in this mood. It is as healthy as irritability in illness. I am even willing to be sacrificed.”

Patience put out her hand and patted his soft hair with a spasm of genuine affection. “You are the dearest boy in the world,” she said, “and I do love you. For all your uncanny wisdom and cold-blooded philosophy you are just a big lovable good-natured boy.”

“Just the kind of fellow a woman would like to have for a brother, in short.”

“No! No! I think it will be the most charming thing in the world to be married to you. You are such a compound. You will interest me forever. Most people are such bores after a little.”

“If you hadn’t started out in life with ideas upside-down, you would really love me in loving me no more than you do now. But ideals and the fixed idea have got to be worked out to the bitter end, as you are fond of remarking. In reality, happiness means a comfortable state of affairs between a man and a woman with plenty of brains, philosophy, and passion, who are wholly congenial in these three matters, and have chucked their illusions overboard. However, we won’t discuss the matter any further at present. How do you like being the sensation of the day?”

“Am I?”

“Are you? Every newspaper in town had a big story this morning, and of course the news has gone all over the country. Nothing else is to be heard in the trains or in Park Row. Oh, you will have plenty to sustain you. Lots of women would give their heads to be in your place.”

He dined with her and remained until eight o’clock. After he had gone, Patience sat for some time lost in a pleasurable reverie. He always left her in a good humour, and she unquestionably loved him. Few women could help loving Morgan Steele. She sighed once as she reflected that love was not the tremendous passion she had once imagined it to be; in all her dreams she had never pictured it as a restful and tranquillising element; but she conceded that Steele’s philosophy was correct.

And if he did not inspire her with a mightier passion it was her fault, not his. Miss Merrien had told her of one brilliant newspaper woman who had made a wilful idiot of herself on his behalf, and of a popular and gifted actress who at one time had taken to haunting the “Day” office, much to the enjoyment of his fellow editors and to his own futile wrath.

“No,” she thought, “I made a mistake once, and the shock was so great that it either benumbed or stunted me; or else the imaginary me was killed and the real developed. And after such a marriage I doubt if there are depths or heights left in one’s nature.”

Then her mind drifted to her predicament, and she wondered that the workings of fear had so wholly ceased. “I suppose it is because that man is going to defend me,” she said, ruthlessly, at last. “They say he could save a man that had been caught driving a knife into another man’s heart with a hammer; so it is quite natural that I should feel safe.”